2 May 2020 // CategoriesFiction, Short story

John’s Head Upstairs

John Malkovich’s head lives upstairs.

After midnight, every night, invariably he plays with his collection of buttons.

He has them of all shapes and colours. Some green and others honey orange, yellow, blue, bluish or bluer, flaming red or burgundy, or red like the blood of an ox. There are black and white ones, also black ones and white ones, pale ones, almost-translucent ones, the-membranes-of-a-frog ones, ones with geometric acetate lace. Some are polished to a sheen and others have rather dotty dots. There are some striped like the zebra and some of fabric, of coffee and milk, hot chocolate and clove and a pile of marshmallows. Curly walnut and filled with raspberry jam. Turquoise with ruby, chryselephantine embroidery, Flemish lace. Droplet of amber in a sunny frill of taffeta in yellow and orange. Curt cotton crimping. And round, squared, oval, triangular, rectangular, trapezoidal, shaped like diamonds, like cat’s eyes, spiralled and trebled, dark galaxies, black holes like the flared nostrils of building administrators downtown. Like cornets, or cinnamon logs. Some resemble cherries, all with stalks and lightning bolts, or fireworks, or what remains after tea. The fluff of stuff, too, and of wine and ink. Buttons like the Christmas dreams of a little boy and buttons like the end-of-year nightmares of my grandfather. Buttons that are not buttons: buttons that are nuzzles and buttons that are promises of new buttons.

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26 April 2020 // CategoriesEssay, Non-fiction

In the End There’s Toilet Roll

So we’re all cooped up in our homes and finding new ways of baking that 5-kilogram bag of flour into things that hopefully look somewhat different. Bread. Scones. Pizza—Hope against hope, on we bake through the sheer and the rough. The world is sidling its way around the shallow end of a deep puddle and we’re all in an indefinite sustained state of quarantine and social distancing, an interlude from life as we’ve come to know it… To the point where one can safely begin an essay with a conjunction without worrying too much about the consequences! Really, who cares? There are more dire necessities—for one thing, toilet roll.

I’m of course referring to what will in future be called by scholars The Great Toilet Paper Rush of 2020, caused by perhaps the most unexpected expected disaster to face humanity in at least 102 years. (Except for that other time we all didn’t agree that Global Warming was a thing and in one or two generations the wallpaper was peeling off the walls—but I’m getting too far ahead of myself.) One thing for which apocalyptic zombie movies didn’t prepare us was people scuffling in the streets for little rolls of white paper pulp. That’s at least one thing every soapbox Nostradamus surely got wrong: hold the toilet roll and you shall finally drive civilisation into that chasm out of which it once climbed. This lack of imagination on their part doesn’t at all surprise me: I can understand panic-buying canned foods, meats, rubbing alcohol and hand sanitiser, even biscuits and chocolate, but I don’t think I would’ve ever thought of toilet paper as a basic human necessity. Indeed, having been introduced en masse to the west as recently as mid 1800s, and considering there are western countries even today that choose to do without, as commodities go this one is by no means so deeply ingrained in our culture as to run parallel with our constitutional rights. And yet visiting a supermarket less than two weeks back one would certainly think otherwise. 

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